The Colour of Milk

(Ecco; 172 pages; 21.99)

Nell Leyshon's terrific new novel, "The Colour of Milk," takes us through a tumultuous year in the life of an outspoken, illiterate English farm girl with a bum leg and "hair the colour of milk." The year is 1831, when 15-year-old Mary learns that her abusive father has pawned her off to the town vicar, forcing her to leave the family farm to work as a servant for the cleric and his dying wife.

This is a familiar plot setup - girl leaves home and is forced to grow up fast - but through the deft handling of her bold and sympathetic protagonist, Leyshon makes it feel fresh. Mary is such an engaging narrator that we, too, understand how jarring and disconcerting it would be to leave the only home she's ever known, bleak though it was, for a new one that, while just a short distance away, is completely foreign.

One of the most impressive and enjoyable aspects of the novel is the risk Leyshon takes with Mary's voice. The vicar, Mr. Graham, teaches Mary to read and write, and she assigns herself the task of writing down her story - the story of this novel. So the prose throughout is grammatically incorrect, nothing is capitalized and words are often misspelled.

Still, the voice never feels gimmicky or cute - rather, it's as if Mary has grabbed the reader by the arm to tell her story in the most simple and urgent way possible.

The prose is direct, immediate, wise and harsh - spare but never thin, beautiful but never flowery: "writing takes a long time. each word has to be lettered and spelled on to the page and when i am done i have to look at it and see if i have chosen right ... and it takes longer for me to write about something that happened than it took for it to happen."

The novel is structured seasonally, beginning and ending in spring. It's a fitting format given that Mary's life on the farm has always been dependent on the seasons. And early in the novel, Mary reveals that "i told my self i would tell you everything that happened ... you will see why," which infuses the seasonal structure with an urgency that heightens even the quietest scenes.

It's as if Leyshon has imposed a ticking clock on the narrative, making the reader hold her breath, knowing that at any moment, things could go from bad to worse for Mary.

The one challenge with this structure is that when things do go from bad to worse, all of the action has to be squeezed into the penultimate "Winter" section. It's quick and arresting reading, but so much happens plot-wise that there isn't much space left in the structure for some of the secondary characters to come fully to the surface during many of the book's most crucial moments.

This is the case especially with Ralph, Mr. Graham's cocky, entitled son, who impregnates Mary's sister Violet and then denies ever having slept with her. Because the baby is born out of wedlock, Mary's mother is forced to pretend it's hers.

Toward the end of the novel Mary's family takes the baby boy to church to be blessed by Mr. Graham. It's an amazing moment where Mary's two worlds converge in a complicated and interesting way. But if Ralph had been more fully developed, the scene could have had an even more devastating impact.

The same is true for Mary's father. He's a volatile man who infuses every scene he enters with terror. Still, villainous is all he gets to be - until, toward the end of the novel, he displays a brief wave of compassion toward Mary. It's a touching and surprising moment that could have been even more so if readers had gotten the chance to know him better.

The world is certainly full of entitled boys and angry fathers, but Leyshon is such a psychologically intuitive writer that it would have been beneficial to see another side to these men, particularly as they're both so integral to the story.

Still, these are minor gripes with a writer who handles the rest of her characters with nuance, warmth and emotional generosity. Mr. and Mrs. Graham are two of the most complex and surprising characters readers will encounter, and Mary's three sisters are all vividly and lovingly rendered.

An early scene has Mary and her sisters lying in a field, fantasizing about their lives off the farm - "i knew i had dreams," Mary tells us, "but i didn't know what they were." It's so palpable and real that the scene feels as classic as "Little Women."

In the end, though, it's Mary who stays with us more than anyone else. She's an unforgettable character, and the book's shocking ending is resonant, heartbreaking and just right. "The Colour of Milk" is a truly wonderful read - a slender, beautiful novel with as much heart as a book twice its size.